Halloween is close now, which makes this a perfect time to revisit my short Gothic comedy film, “They Came From the Kitchen Sink”:
The parameters of this video project were simply to make a video showing the daily life of an inanimate object. I chose a pair of salad tongs that look like skeleton hands. I’m a bit of a sucker for Halloween decor that ends up being year-round decor, and I couldn’t resist those when I saw them at the Dollar Tree!
Some fun facts about this video:
- The thumping noise at the beginning is from one of the absolute earliest recordings ever made: Lucae’s 1862 Phonautograph
- The title is a riff on typical “B Movie” horror titles from the 1950s, like “It Came from the Sea” or “It Eats You Alive”. In Rochester, NY, where I grew up, the George Eastman House Museum has a movie theater that plays restored vintage films. They play every kind of movie imaginable, from major Old Hollywood hits to obscure indie films. The film curators would pick various themes, like “Sci-Fi Movies from the 1970s” or “John Hughes movies”, etc. Decades ago, they ran a 1950s B Movie series, and my parents would drop me and my friends off at double features to get us out of the house for a while!
- The baseball that the hands play with is from a Cyclones game in Brooklyn. One of the more unusual jobs I used to have was being a Nickelodeon costume character for various events. One time, I got to throw the first pitch at a game while wearing a Paw Patrol mascot costume because the Cyclones did a promo with Nickelodeon. That ball was a souvenir from the experience!
- I’m related to everyone in the 19th-century portraits. The man with the beard is my great-great grandfather Dyer Crowell, who owned a small fleet of ships in the mid-19th century and was a blockade runner during the Civil War. The other two are his aunt and uncle, Daniel and Ruth Crowell, who established my family’s farm in Rome, NY. I think the moved west from Connecticut because the Year without a Summer made New England so inhospitable in the late 1810s. When I was growing up, their portraits were in a poorly-lit back hallway at the top of a rickety, winding set of stairs in that house. My brother pointed out that no matter where you stood in that hallway, it looked like they were staring at you. If you walked back and forth down the hall without looking away, it looked like their eyes were moving. I asked my grandpa if the house was haunted, and he told me not to worry about it because, “ghosts are just people who are dead now. They can’t hurt you!” I used to tell all my friends at school about how I spent the night in a haunted house. These portraits ended up in my apartment because I was the only person out of over 40 grandchildren to genuinely say I wanted the “Addams Family aesthetic” of having them on display. All three portraits were taken about 150 years ago.
- The device that the hands are playing with is a spinning weasel that belonged to Ruth Crowell. It’s most likely from the 1820s or 1830s and was carved entirely by hand. The purpose of it is to measure skeins of yarn after they’ve been spun. It won “Best of Category” in antiques at the Sioux Empire Fair this summer after I got it restored. My entire life, it never worked until I found someone in Sioux Falls who was able to fix it.
- The soundtrack is an example of New Wave music that was written recently: Molchat Doma‘s “Судно.” The lyrics for this song were inspired by Boris Ryzhy‘s poem of the same name. Like many people in 2021, I spent what would be an unacceptable amount of time video chatting on Discord under normal circumstances. Fortunately, I had an interesting and supportive group of friends from around the world on there, and we would play Jackbox games, discuss absurd conspiracy theories and tell raunchy, outrageous jokes together. One of my friends on there, Dasha, lived in Siberia, and she used to send me links to music she liked. At one point we joked about marrying each other so she could get American citizenship. About a month before Putin invaded Ukraine, our server got shut down. I could never get back in contact with her after that. I’m still in touch with two people from that Discord server– one in Texas, who I see every time I go to Dallas to visit family, and one in California. All three of us have questions about who everyone in the original server really was and what happened to most of them, but at least I had the fun of finding new music because of that group, including Molchat Doma.
My friends refer to this sort of anthology as “Anna Stories.” To be an “Anna Story,” the story must sound slightly unreal and very intense but be told in a way that makes it sound like, “What do you mean you haven’t done this before?” Some “Anna Stories” are almost like David Lean films, where epic global events are set dressing for the character-driven stuff going on. The older I get, the weirder and more extensive the “Anna Stories” archive gets.